Not so much the apprenticeship, but my formal education was in a trade school in Australia (TAFE, back when it was funded properly, my 2 years cost about $2K).

Not so much the apprenticeship, but my formal education was in a trade school in Australia (TAFE, back when it was funded properly, my 2 years cost about $2K). It was a lot more hands on and less theory than comp sci, which meant the graduates could actually code. Even a lot of the theory we did cover was done through hands on activities, like creating our own databases so we had to know how things were stored and indexed efficiently. The only major areas left out that are of use in the real world were the lower level stuff (c/asm) unix tools, which would have served us better than learning how to mail merge in the early "computing" courses. From what I've heard Germany has a similar trade school path for software development.